ABSTRACT
In recent years, historical musicology has come close to critiquing itself out of business. Scholars have argued ever more vigorously that the pursuit of music history is driven-and its results contaminated-by the values, creative impulses, dreams, illusions, and neuroses of our time. Historical inquiry, they concur, is fundamentally creative, expressive of who we are. Nor could it be otherwise. Without the firm interpretive hand of the music historian, the massive flood of unsorted, undigested, unprocessed material that we euphemistically call “historical evidence” would remain devoid of any apparent sense or meaning. That material is the clay, the raw material, that we are irresistibly driven to cut, shape, and mold in our image. We pick and choose, select and combine, whatever evidence we need to fill out the patterns we wish to perceive. That is why history is so rewarding. It is the creative act of imposing order on chaos.
